Speficity of the subjects: lexicography and contrastive Linguistics

Definitions in a unilingual dictionary

• synonyms
• linguistic definitions – concerned with words as speech material (lexical data) – British dictionaries
• encyclopedic definitions – concerned with things for which the words are names (realia) – American dictionaries
• examples (context)

Types of English Dictionaries

• Encyclopedic – thing-books dealing with concepts (objects and phenomena, their origin and development, etc.)
• e.g. influenza – causes, symptoms, treatments and remedies, etc.

Types of English Dictionaries

• Linguistic – word-books dealing with vocabulary units (semantic structure, usage, etc.)
• e.g. influenza – spelling, pronunciation, grammar characteristics, derivatives, synonyms, etc.

Types of Linguistic Dictionaries

• 24 General Dictionaries
• present a wide range of data about the vocabulary items in ordinary use
• Webster’s New International Dictionary, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Current English

• Explanatory (Unilingual) Dictionary
• spelling and pronunciation
• grammatical characteristics (part of speech, (in)transitivity, irregular forms)
• meanings (extended definitions or synonyms)

• Explanatory (Unilingual) Dictionary
• spelling and pronunciation
• grammatical characteristics (part of speech, (in)transitivity, irregular forms)
• meanings (extended definitions or synonyms)

• Translation (Bilingual) Dictionary
• contain vocabulary items in one language and their equivalents in another language
• main problem – to ensure adequate translation

Special Dictionaries

• cover only a specific part of the vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms, phraseology, neologisms, terms, etc.)
• provide information limited to one particular aspect (collocability, word-frequency, etymology, pronunciation, etc.)

Dictionaries of Synonyms

• A Dictionary of English Synonyms and Synonymous Expressions (R. Soule)
• Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms

Phraseological Dictionaries

• The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs
• Book of English Idioms (V.H. Collins)
• An Anglo-Russian Phraseological Dictionary (A.V. Koonin)

• Ideological Dictionary
• words are arranged not alphabetically
• words are grouped according to their semantic fields
• designed for English-speaking writes, translators
• Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (P.M. Roget)